The truth is that he never left the path first hinted at with his early arrangements of ‘Zamba de Vargas’, ‘Siete de abril’ and ‘La López Pereira’. At a time when exercises in reinventing oneself are in vogue, it would be wrong to say that Manolo has reinvented himself with every album. He has done so with such well-defined coherence that one struggles to think of comparable contemporaries. Some guardians of tradition reject this approach to folk music but no honest listener with a passing familiarity with Argentinian music can argue that his ‘empanada doesn’t bleed’ as he’d put it many years later.įrom that 1970 debut to the presentation in 2014 of his new quartet at the Biblioteca Nacional, Manolo has preserved the link between folk traditions and modernity with his impressionist piano playing. The rhythmic and melodic bonds are strong, they reveal an identity. Isn’t that what Bill Evans does when he improvises over a standard, when by the second chorus the music is almost unrecognizable from the song with which it began? However, one must listen to Manolo and his musicians more closely to see that for them folk music is more than just an inspiration. Now the chords, harmonic tension and games of texture with which Manolo would make his name in popular music seemed to confirm that distance, relegating the influence of folk to just that a beginning, the memory of something remote but loved. The Buenos Aires where he lived, the hectic city of the 60s and 70s, seemed utterly different to the bucolic Córdoba of the 1940s. Between the two scenes lay a space-time that represented an apparently insurmountable chasm. The amateur musician had died some time before and Manolo is now an impeccably trained ‘classical’ composer and also an inspired ‘popular’ piano player.
Manolo is about to record his first album, Trío Juárez, when he discovers that the chosen repertory takes him back to the moment when he fell in love with folk music, when the rural took precedent over the urban, brevity over length. He’d left his other loves back in Buenos Aires: his father, tango by Julio De Caro, Schubert’s Impromptus and Bob Crosby’s jazz.Īnother scene from many years later: 1970. Young Manuel would listen with delight when his mother, sister of the old man’s daughter in law, took him to Córdoba on holiday. He was a worker who noodled around a little when he got home.
When thinking back to his childhood in Buenos Aires and Córdoba, Manolo lets one of these anecdotes do the talking and in moving fashion: a tale about an old bandoneon player standing barefoot in a fountain, playing traditional folk tunes while his daughters bathed him. A scene from the past shimmering like the chords with which the pianist brings out the syncopation of an old zamba, revealing who he was and who he still is even if life is always changing us little by little, step by step, beat by beat. Manolo Juárez’s memories of the most important periods of his life are often peppered with anecdotes. Text for the CD ‘Anthology 1’ by Sergio Pujol
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